In image 4 there's a car with the licence plate "LYE897D".
D plates are from 1966, so after that.
In the first image there's a building being constructed next to Manchester Art Gallery, so I'll try to find out when that went up. EDIT eh, it's 75 Mosley Street but I have no idea when it was built.
The photos do appear to be mid-late 60s from the cars you can see.
But I'll observe that the Uni of Manchester buildings photos could have been from 1987 or 1990 -- being when I saw them myself, still near-black on the Oxford Road side.
This is just cleaning the facades! Edinburgh prohibits this kind of cosmetic work in ordr to keep the historical character of buildings (tho sandstone doesn't go as black as limestone).
I remember the cleaning of the Scott Monument was a very contentious issue - which was eventually abandoned. Nowadays you can see the contrast between the old/dirty stone and the new pieces used for restoration.
I'm actually sitting in an office in George Street looking out of my window at a stone wall where I can see that the entire one building has been cleaned and the next door one hasn't! :-)
The National Galleries near the Mound was cleaned entirely a few years back - it's actually starting to collect dark marks on it again.
When I was small most of Edinburgh looked exactly like these photos, and they didn't start washing it until the late 80s.
(edit: come to think of it, entire central Edinburgh area still smelled of coal smoke in the mornings until about then, too, though Musselburgh even more so)
If you were allowed to sue polluters for damages to your property is a common example I've seen. So for example you notice your building is being blackened and sue the coal fired plant down the street for the cleaning fees to restore it's facade.
Sounds good but it is totally impractical if you've had any experience with the legal system.
There should be some company that makes money by detecting pollution, determining its source(s), and potentially providing insurance - or litigation. This would give incentive to find previously unknown pollutants that maybe even the factory and environmentalists were unaware of. The government has been very ineffective at this: see Flint Michigan.
It's not possible, because pollution is an externality[0], something that's well known to destabilize free markets. Without regulation, purely profit driven actors have no incentive to reduce pollution one bit, since doing so gives them an economic disadvantage against their polluting peers.
Companies that take negative externalities and make them real for the customer at a profit are good solutions available to entrepreneurs. Charity is a good case for this. Government reactions to negative externalities have so far been pretty dismal.
I think biology would have "solved" the problem in this case. Without regulation and sustained pollution, the population would eventually decrease enough (through migration and increased mortality rate) to reduce pollution.
Or more explicitly - governments choose to deny citizens certain property rights with the aim of increasing economic development (possibly run by friends of, or contributors to, those in government). So citizens harmed by externalities such as pollution cannot sue for redress
Sure, it was individuals in a marketplace that invented the things we used now which are cleaner and more efficient. You can't regulate inventions into existence. And imagine how much customers would be willing to pay if they were in a dirty environment, and you came up with an even equally efficient technology that was cleaner...
On top of this, the more regulation you have, the more you don't have a separation between business an government. And isn't that what everyone is complaining about these days? For example, ISPs, pharma, telecom, insurance, and medicine have all become huge liabilities to compete with - unless you're one of the few designated players in the space.
No one on the free market side claims the clean air act did nothing. So it is very unfair that seemingly everyone on the opposing side is pushing the idea that the clean air act did everything (which you can tell by this graph is not true).
Tort law. It was the government, that prohibited suing polluters in the first place (in the name of a progress). Free-market cities probably wouldn't have ICE cars or fabrics nearby, because it would be prohibitively expensive to buy a permission to pollute from each land-owner in a city.
Believe me, they’re much better clean. The limestone ones, when the sun shines “just so”, seem to be made of gold - which is probably on purpose, considering when they were built Manchester was the centre of the world, richer than London or most other places on Earth.
Better architects of the period understood the effects of soot and played to them. Because houses were heated with coal it was a problem even before the industrial revolution. As such, some architectural historians believe that buildings shouldn’t be cleaned for that reason.
Try the Hold Saviour Church in Gyumri, Armenia, which is built from black and orange stone. It's close to the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God, also black.
As do I. I always like old industrial cities in the north of the UK for the unusual character they have due to the black buildings. I’m sure some buildings look better cleaned, but I hope they don’t get carried away and remove the unique character of these cities.
Do you actually live here? Black buildings under a dark sky most of the year -- it gets really depressing. I am grateful for the red-stones, old limestone buildings getting cleaned, and new ones adding some color (quite a bit of yellows and whites recently, among the inevitable onslaught of glass and steel).
Yes, without going into too specific details to maintain privacy I have spent most of my life in northern industrial towns. I can see the argument for it being depressing, and I dont think they shouldn’t be cleaned at all. What I am saying is that I hope some particularly impressive buildings are kept black to maintain that character. Cleaning some would provide some variety and I have no problem with that.
10 Downing Street in London was similarly yellow darkened by soot. During the refurbishment they decided to paint the yellow bricks to maintain the classic look of the building.
Which I believe flies in the face of the recommendations. I am not an expert on this but I think that all consent should be deliberate and informed, and not "automatic - opps I just clicked through and automatically signed up because I didn't read to the end."
It's a shady tactic to just get you to accept cookies. If the tracking is not active until you actually click accept though, I think it should technically still count as opt-in? I mean they make you jump through hoops if you want no tracking and get rid of the cookie banner - but you could also just ignore it for the same effect, as the banner does not limit the use of the site (unlike banners of others websites that block the whole content until you take action).
I always click manage and opt out and insane opt outs like this is actually quite common, a lot of news sites with tracking seem to have like 50-100 opt outs, it's insane.
There seems to be a company providing this as a service and their's is one of the worst, with a load of the sites requiring you to go to distinct external sites to opt out.
Possibly related - London’s Great Fog of 1952 was a big catalyst for change, with 4000-12,000 dying in a few days due to health problems from the fog. It was pretty grim.
I can’t believe the Manchester Evening News is on HN. I bet they’ve pillaged these pics from Manchester Revisited (FB group).
As I said in another comment, look up the Lowry paintings to get an idea of how bad the air was in industrial England. He lived in Salford, right beside Manchester.
Most of Manchester city centre is old warehouses and offices, the city was basically a giant coal-powered factory and distribution centre. The St. Anne church in central Stockport (again near Manchester) didn’t get the cleaning treatment until the 2010s, I honestly believed it was just built black.
Imperial Britain was basically like today’s China: bustling, polluted, exploiting the poor and vulnerable (child labor etc etc), with no care whatsoever for consequences as long as someone was getting rich.
I agree! I only ever see the MEN in my FB news feed. Even funnier: I can see the Lowry from where I'm sat!
Salford is similar. I live in Eccles and there's a few old buildings. One is the Bridgewater mill. It's a big dirty building that's been converted into a business unit. I remember I used to go to a gym in there.
Salford is apparently the most poluted area in the UK today. There's no smog but as you move further out towards Cheshire / Warrington, like Irlam and Cadishead, it's a world apart.
Even stranger to see Eccles and Irlam mentioned by someone here - I grew up in those two places!
You mean the Bridgewater Mill by Patricroft bridge, right? If you're interested in Victorian era tech, there's also a Nasmyth steam hammer a little bit up Worsley Road.
Grew up in Irlam, went to school in Eccles! Lots of family in Eccles too. Small world!
That's the one. I'll check that out - I love stuff like this. The entire canal has a lot of great historic stuff along it. I used to cycle down it to work in Media City and if it's not tech, it's beautiful scenery all the way down.
Ahhhh yes. Might be confusing it with another list that places Salford 1st in a list of most alcoholics by area. Eccles is up on that list - that's the one I was thinking of.
I've been to Salford a couple times (my company is there) and we stay at a hotel in Media City. Even that area which I have to assume is the "gem" in their crown is physically dirty.
To be fair, Media City has been basically a giant building site for years, it's not that bad these days I think. This said, on the other side of the Irwell / ship canal there is still Trafford Park, an industrial site (Kellogg's used to have a huge factory and HQ there).
Even with all the building work, MediaCity always seems pristine. It's like stepping into a different country.
MediaCity made my head spin when I first walked through it. One minute I'm in industrial Trafford Park, 5 minutes of a Salford I've never seen before and then, like an invisible border, everything looks like Salford as usual again.
After spending most my life in Salford, it was hard to believe I was actually in Salford
Things are much better now, but there's still some progress to be made.
I live in Southern England, and my HEPA air filter looks black after 12 months of filtration indoors. It's super scary.
My windows have very noticeable black particles outside, probably originating from combustion engines and coal power plants.
I can't wait till we get rid of those. Walking or biking downtown Oxford or Cambridge during rush hour feels really unhealthy. You can smell diesel fumes from buses, lorries and cars every second.
I used to live between the main railway line from King's Cross and a large road.
The window facing the road would get a film of oily black grease, and the windows facing the railway a coating of oily particles.
I don't know which was more dangerous. Hopefully the next government un-cancels the railway electrification projects, if only for the pollution it saves.
It's also worth pointing out that Trafford Park, only 3 miles from the centre, was proudly claimed to have been the densest industrial development on the planet until the end of the war. It was the primary target of the Manchester blitz, as there was much aircraft (Avro) and tank (Vickers) production, not to forget Ford's old plant producing Merlins, and the ICI plant. Also home to lots of warehouses and food companies including the then fairly new Kellogg's plant. There were bomb sites that lasted into the 80s. The big Royal Ordnance plant in Patricroft (Bridgewater Foundry) hung on until the 90s.
There was a lot of industry packed in between the ship canal and the Bridgewater.
Fancy apartments in Salford Quays were only possible after a lot of decline.
Well count me among the folks who had to go to Wikipedia to figure out what Ford was doing building an engine famously made by Rolls-Royce. Thanks for the bit of history.
More generally, this was part of the Shadow Factory Scheme, whereby a number of motor industry plants across the UK were moved to manufacturing aircraft, their components, and their engines from the mid-1930s as Germany rearmed and war was seen as increasing risk.
Ford had their UK plant in Trafford Park from around the First War years until the 30s when they completed building a far larger site in Dagenham. They were asked to resurrect it, as they still had the site, for Merlin production as one of the many shadow factories.
The location made sense, Ford Merlins usually went into 4 engined Lancasters as Avro and Metrovick had several sites nearby that produced the majority of the type.
This should be a frightening reminder to some of the cities in China and India that are heavily industrializing with more than 10x the population of Manchester.
Or what it looks like when you get rid of the cars themselves from inner cities. I got rid of my car over a decade ago and after a few years really started noticing just how much of a burden cars are on city life and how much of an eye sore. Amusingly you get a bit of an impression of what it could be by looking at the present day pictures from the article, because they’re google street view pictures and google tries to remove most of the cars. Realistic present day pictures would have the cars bumper to bumper on most of the roads.
(Getting rid of all cars is probably not possible, but 90+% of them aren’t necessary, could be parked at the city’s edge and I’m pretty sure most city residents would agree after a year or two it is better that way.)
I sold my car earlier this year, and started bicycle commuting again about a month ago. I honestly hadn't realized just how wasteful of space car traffic is.
When I commuted by public transit, It was mostly not directly visible to me, especially when I took the train and just bypassed all the traffic. But riding my bike, I see just how clogged up the roads get, and just how much the flow gets disturbed by people blocking intersections and creating gridlock.
The vast majority of these cars are only transporting a single occupant, even the huge 7-seat SUVs. The amount of wasted space is simply astounding.
If we could keep even just the city centers free of cars, there would be so much more space available for pedestrians and cyclists and city life. Sure, allow some commercial traffic, such as deliveries, tradesmen with jobs to do in the city, buses and taxi services.
Ban all private car traffic, and only hand out temporary permits for transporting home bulky objects or similar short-term undertakings. Price it so that people won't just buy one every single day. Maybe set a limit on how many permits are allowed per month, to prevent the wealthy from gaming the system.
They kinda tried that in London with congestion charging - i.e. you have to pay £11.50 or £21.50 (depending on vehicle) a day to drive into central London.
Latest data I could easily find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge) was that after 10 years of operation it reduced traffic by 10% (ten). A report from 2014 said that traffic levels are now close to pre-congestion-charge levels (https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/roads/cc-changes-march-2014...). The public buses and privately-run taxis are everywhere and are significant causes of traffic in my anecdotal experience (e.g. bus blocking the road waiting for someone to finish talking to the driver, bus blocking junction, buses blocking road waiting to get into bus stop where 5 other buses already are waiting to pick-up or put-down, taxi-drivers stopping in illegal places to drop people off or doing illegal u-turns etc etc. Whats worse is the buses are diesel and pump out loads of fumes from their heavy diesel engines. Bus ridership is falling (http://www.mayorwatch.co.uk/londons-bus-ridership-is-falling...) yet we still have to put up with them and their diesel.
tl;dr - charging doesn't work at the £10-20/day prices (equivalent to 3.6 to 6.7 Big Macs on the BigMacIndex a day to drive into london)
I guess it might work if the fees go up an order of magnitude.
That will help with roadway noise, but won't make as significant an impact as many people (not saying you specifically) might assume. The majority of noise comes from the tire/road interface: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/06/05/will-electric-cars-make...
Aye, I know - but I have noticed a massive difference in drive by noise whenever a Tesla S drives past, versus much smaller cars like Renaults and such. It's enough to make a difference individually, I'm curious to hear what it's like cumulatively.
I suppose the big one I'm waiting for is electric motorbikes - I've whinged them on HN beforehand, but those buggers can be heard from blocks away, waking or annoying thousands - tens of thousands! - of people in built-up urban areas.
On the other hand, the noise peaks from (older) accelerating engines is one of the most annoying sounds. I can live with the background hum of tire/road friction.
Most UK cities looked like this for the entire portion of my life I wasn't allowed to vote yet. I grew up in London (and slightly in Edinburgh area) and the centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow were pitch black all over right into the late 1980s when the sandwashing began.
This photo of London St Pancras station, for example, looks like it is colour-drained, but that's really how it looked until they washed the building in the 90s.
That sign was inlined with slightly-feeble red neon, and that will remain my mental image of how this station looks even though obviously it's been utterly transformed since:
I grew up in Pittsburgh. During my childhood I remember a lot of black stone buildings. I always assumed there was some kind of dark colored stone that was used to build buildings & churches. It wasn't until I was 12 or so that these buildings started getting cleaned that I realized they were all soot stained.
Some power washers integrate sand into the water stream. So sandblasted, but by a high pressure jet of water carrying sand instead of air blasted sand.
It's pretty stark to see the difference between the cleaned and dirty buildings. There are sections of the Mellon Institute columns [1] which are uncleaned as a reminder of how bad they used to be.
Was in Sheffield recently, not far from Manchester. The town hall still appears to have the sooty facade. In the context of all the new stuff surrounding it, the sooty building kind of looks nice. Maybe it's worth keeping some of these in their sooty state as a reminder (and warning) of how horrible the air once was?
Watch the last few minutes of The Ipcress File with Michael Caine - he walks out of his bosses office and across London's Trafalgar Square - and the whole place is black with a century of soot. It's astounding as i have only ever known it after a mass sand blasting in the eighties (my Blue Peter Annual showed pictures)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadAlso (2015)
D plates are from 1966, so after that.
In the first image there's a building being constructed next to Manchester Art Gallery, so I'll try to find out when that went up. EDIT eh, it's 75 Mosley Street but I have no idea when it was built.
But I'll observe that the Uni of Manchester buildings photos could have been from 1987 or 1990 -- being when I saw them myself, still near-black on the Oxford Road side.
I was initially going to say 1970 - but apparently 1967 saw both E and F registered cars. I never knew that.
Industrial England lived under a black sky, from all the coal being burnt.
But there is still the issue that SOx erodes CaCO3 stone, and facilitates soot buildup. So you get this black foamy crust.
It peaked in about 1890 when GB was using about 160 million tonnes per year.
It was a shock to realize how dirty they were before that !
The National Galleries near the Mound was cleaned entirely a few years back - it's actually starting to collect dark marks on it again.
(edit: come to think of it, entire central Edinburgh area still smelled of coal smoke in the mornings until about then, too, though Musselburgh even more so)
Sounds good but it is totally impractical if you've had any experience with the legal system.
What if the cost of cleaning is smaller than the cost of changing business practices to protect health and the environment?
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Or rather, how this sort of thing happens because of the ‘wrong sort of’ government action
On top of this, the more regulation you have, the more you don't have a separation between business an government. And isn't that what everyone is complaining about these days? For example, ISPs, pharma, telecom, insurance, and medicine have all become huge liabilities to compete with - unless you're one of the few designated players in the space.
Checkout page 15: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/-air-quality-...
No one on the free market side claims the clean air act did nothing. So it is very unfair that seemingly everyone on the opposing side is pushing the idea that the clean air act did everything (which you can tell by this graph is not true).
Try the Hold Saviour Church in Gyumri, Armenia, which is built from black and orange stone. It's close to the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God, also black.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holy_Saviour_Church_...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014_Prowincja_Szira...
Considering the industrial heritage I'd also like to see a few preserved that way. I'm just glad I grew up after the clean air act!
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Downing_Street#Rebuilding:_...
During the WWII bombings, the cathedral was damaged at the front, which was repaired only recently. The original color can also be seen there: http://in0.bilderbuch-koeln.de/bilder/k%C3%B6ln_altstadt_nor...
As you can see, the repaired area is already blackening again. AFAIK, this is inevitable with this kind of stone.
There seems to be a company providing this as a service and their's is one of the worst, with a load of the sites requiring you to go to distinct external sites to opt out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
Several cities in the UK (Bath, Coventry in particular) I remember as a child in the 80s suddenly had a lot of buildings that were no longer black.
As I said in another comment, look up the Lowry paintings to get an idea of how bad the air was in industrial England. He lived in Salford, right beside Manchester.
Most of Manchester city centre is old warehouses and offices, the city was basically a giant coal-powered factory and distribution centre. The St. Anne church in central Stockport (again near Manchester) didn’t get the cleaning treatment until the 2010s, I honestly believed it was just built black.
Imperial Britain was basically like today’s China: bustling, polluted, exploiting the poor and vulnerable (child labor etc etc), with no care whatsoever for consequences as long as someone was getting rich.
Salford is literally "Dirty Old Town"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wj7xZf8xm8
Salford is similar. I live in Eccles and there's a few old buildings. One is the Bridgewater mill. It's a big dirty building that's been converted into a business unit. I remember I used to go to a gym in there.
Salford is apparently the most poluted area in the UK today. There's no smog but as you move further out towards Cheshire / Warrington, like Irlam and Cadishead, it's a world apart.
You mean the Bridgewater Mill by Patricroft bridge, right? If you're interested in Victorian era tech, there's also a Nasmyth steam hammer a little bit up Worsley Road.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...
That's the one. I'll check that out - I love stuff like this. The entire canal has a lot of great historic stuff along it. I used to cycle down it to work in Media City and if it's not tech, it's beautiful scenery all the way down.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-43964341
Having lived in both (Uni in Salford), grew up near Scunthorpe. I'd reckon Scunthorpe is worse.
Thanks for pointing it out!
MediaCity made my head spin when I first walked through it. One minute I'm in industrial Trafford Park, 5 minutes of a Salford I've never seen before and then, like an invisible border, everything looks like Salford as usual again.
After spending most my life in Salford, it was hard to believe I was actually in Salford
I live in Southern England, and my HEPA air filter looks black after 12 months of filtration indoors. It's super scary.
My windows have very noticeable black particles outside, probably originating from combustion engines and coal power plants.
I can't wait till we get rid of those. Walking or biking downtown Oxford or Cambridge during rush hour feels really unhealthy. You can smell diesel fumes from buses, lorries and cars every second.
The window facing the road would get a film of oily black grease, and the windows facing the railway a coating of oily particles.
I don't know which was more dangerous. Hopefully the next government un-cancels the railway electrification projects, if only for the pollution it saves.
There was a lot of industry packed in between the ship canal and the Bridgewater.
Fancy apartments in Salford Quays were only possible after a lot of decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Merlin#Manchester
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_shadow_factories
The location made sense, Ford Merlins usually went into 4 engined Lancasters as Avro and Metrovick had several sites nearby that produced the majority of the type.
Imagine what it will look like when we ban diesel from urban & suburban areas!
(Getting rid of all cars is probably not possible, but 90+% of them aren’t necessary, could be parked at the city’s edge and I’m pretty sure most city residents would agree after a year or two it is better that way.)
When I commuted by public transit, It was mostly not directly visible to me, especially when I took the train and just bypassed all the traffic. But riding my bike, I see just how clogged up the roads get, and just how much the flow gets disturbed by people blocking intersections and creating gridlock.
The vast majority of these cars are only transporting a single occupant, even the huge 7-seat SUVs. The amount of wasted space is simply astounding.
If we could keep even just the city centers free of cars, there would be so much more space available for pedestrians and cyclists and city life. Sure, allow some commercial traffic, such as deliveries, tradesmen with jobs to do in the city, buses and taxi services.
Ban all private car traffic, and only hand out temporary permits for transporting home bulky objects or similar short-term undertakings. Price it so that people won't just buy one every single day. Maybe set a limit on how many permits are allowed per month, to prevent the wealthy from gaming the system.
Quality of life would increase massively.
Latest data I could easily find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge) was that after 10 years of operation it reduced traffic by 10% (ten). A report from 2014 said that traffic levels are now close to pre-congestion-charge levels (https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/roads/cc-changes-march-2014...). The public buses and privately-run taxis are everywhere and are significant causes of traffic in my anecdotal experience (e.g. bus blocking the road waiting for someone to finish talking to the driver, bus blocking junction, buses blocking road waiting to get into bus stop where 5 other buses already are waiting to pick-up or put-down, taxi-drivers stopping in illegal places to drop people off or doing illegal u-turns etc etc. Whats worse is the buses are diesel and pump out loads of fumes from their heavy diesel engines. Bus ridership is falling (http://www.mayorwatch.co.uk/londons-bus-ridership-is-falling...) yet we still have to put up with them and their diesel.
tl;dr - charging doesn't work at the £10-20/day prices (equivalent to 3.6 to 6.7 Big Macs on the BigMacIndex a day to drive into london)
I guess it might work if the fees go up an order of magnitude.
I have a sneaking suspicion that ICE cars have a less than wonderful impact on insects too, but that's just a feeling.
I suppose the big one I'm waiting for is electric motorbikes - I've whinged them on HN beforehand, but those buggers can be heard from blocks away, waking or annoying thousands - tens of thousands! - of people in built-up urban areas.
(ed. spelling)
I know they won't kill the tire/wind sounds, but if they break the mental association of loud == fast == cool for men, it could be a game changer.
No more ridiculously loud acceleration from 'modded' cars and bikes...
Also heavy trucks / buses under acceleration can be loud too, hopefully those'll go away as well.
Some of which are already technically illegal, its just a law that's not enforced well.
Apparently, when cleaned in the 1960s to reveal it’s yellow London bricks, it just didn’t look right!
http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-10-downing-street-door-is-...
This photo of London St Pancras station, for example, looks like it is colour-drained, but that's really how it looked until they washed the building in the 90s.
https://farm2.static.flickr.com/1818/43873591751_154164f8d5_...
That sign was inlined with slightly-feeble red neon, and that will remain my mental image of how this station looks even though obviously it's been utterly transformed since:
https://blackcablondon.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/st-pancra...
https://www.reddit.com/r/powerwashingporn/comments/6ev3pe/ca...
They say "sand blasted" but I'm pretty sure they used gentler methods.
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mellon-institute-columns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk